The Department’s mission is to educate students broadly in contemporary Psychology. Because we recognize that relatively few of our students will be academic psychologists, we strive to prepare them in multiple ways for a world in which knowledge of psychology will be useful.
By training students broadly, we mean first to provide students with perspective. To facilitate this, the curriculum is structured in the following ways:
- To offer a comprehensive set of course offerings covering major lines of contemporary work within the field of Psychology)
- To establish explicit connections between Psychology and other fields (inter-disciplinary collaborations) and the world outside Smith (community-based learning)
- To broaden students' perspectives from an individual and cultural point of view, so that they come to appreciate behavioral diversity and understand a wide range of approaches to personal and social reality
Our mission is to develop skills that will serve students well in Psychology, but that can also be applied in other important arenas:
- Students develop requisite writing, quantitative, and communication skills within the discipline
- Students receive “hands on” training in the evaluation and conduct of research in the field of psychology
- The curriculum facilitates active learning of the content, methods, and theories of the discipline in both its academic (pure) and applied (practical) forms
- Students learn to think critically about behavior and mental processes, to understand the relations among theories, observations and conclusions, and to weigh evidence in evaluating particular theories or approaches
- Faculty and students exchange frank, open and intellectually stimulating dialogue about psychology
- Students develop multicultural fluency; the ability to view issues from different cultural perspectives and to ask pertinent questions about cultural influences
Major strengths of the Department in carrying out its mission include:
- Emphases on student participation in research of all types
- Faculty-student collaboration and mentoring
- Giving students opportunities for in-depth study and discussion of important issues in psychology
- Preparation and guidance for future studies in postgraduate settings in psychology and related fields
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